Does Diablo III Need a Different End Game?

Posted By: July 9, 2012

Since Bashiok was sent forth last week to deliver the “item hunting is not enough of an End Game” message, there have been countless articles on general gaming sites about it. I haven’t read all of them, but the majority are treating the announcement as a huge revelation, or an admission of utter disaster. Which is weird, since it’s neither.

What’s also weird is that I haven’t seen one of those general gaming sites point out what pretty much all long-time Diablo 2 players thought when they first read Bashiok’s post; that D2’s end game is item hunting, and that it’s been going strong for more than a decade. Thus the problem isn’t (just) that D3’s end game is item hunting… the problem is that the item system needs improvement, which makes the hunt a lot less exciting.

It’s been said many, many times before, but D3’s item system is nowhere near as interesting as what we had in Diablo 2, largely (but not entirely) since D3’s Sets and Uniques are boring, underpowered, and far too rarely-found. (Happily, the developers agree on those points and they’re working to make big improvements to those items in a upcoming patch.)

What about the larger issue, though? Should Diablo 3 have provided more to the end game? Obviously the lack of PvP is unfortunate, and I think it’s going to be a huge deal when the Arenas go live, since basically every knowledgeable fan I know who played PvP in the demos at Blizzcon 2010 and 2011 thought it was awesome and much more fun than the PvE demos at those shows. But PvP aside, thanks to the largely-flat Inferno difficulty, D3 offers vastly more farmable end game areas than D2 did. It does not offer MMO style end game exclusive content though, and that seems to be what’s disappointing a lot of the casual fans and WoW players, which seems to be the audience Bashiok was addressing, and that’s definitely the mindset that the articles on general gaming sites are coming from. For example, here’s a new piece on Kotaku this morning.

It makes sense that players are expecting more than what Diablo III currently provides. This is the type of audience the gaming industry — with its day1 DLC and long-term content plans — has primed. An audience hungry for more, because there always is more.

I’d go as far as to say that games like Diablo III are already somewhat complicit in that reality. Games that have procedurally generated elements have greater replay value, and if a player doesn’t lose interest, the game does its best to provide “new” material to stay engaged with indefinitely.

Consider, too, that design sees constant player engagement as the holy grail. If a game doesn’t provide content in equal measure, however, then creating a game that knows how to keep users playing is useless.

You can’t create an environment like that and wonder why users clamor for more. Of course 500+ hours of content is not enough. 500+ hours is still a game that ends.

So what do you guys think? Has the market and industry changed to the point that a game with Diablo 2 style end game is no longer acceptable? After all, if D2 were released today, all the complaints about D3’s end game would hit it even harder. When I think back on the year of D2C and the number of runs we all did through the tiny Act 4, which was the only thing even approaching end game content, it makes any complaints about what D3 offers seem comical. But 2012 is not 2000, and what was enough back then is not enough today.

In a few months D3 will have a much better item system, as well as PvP… but will that be enough? Or does the community demand more. More! MOAR! What would that be, then? We’re not going to get whole new dungeons or levels, not until the expansion in 2 or 3 years, but I’ve seen a lot of comments asking for more end game modes, such as endless dungeons, tower defense game types, team play, and so on. Want? Need? Too late/don’t care? Let’s vote.

I thought you were taking the mick, until I saw two people went for 5.

Apart from improving, fixing and increasing the variety of items, I wish they added more content. I remember Bashiok once said that they would add new content with the last Diablo 2 patch, but when it came out, it wasn’t there. Shame. I hope to have new content for Diablo 3 before expansions.

#1 Improve items. Pretty obvious #2 Add a huge endless grind a-la 80-99 D2, for minimal rewards and a ladder to display current top standings. #3 PVP with ladder and standings too (doesn’t matter what gear you have, you only get matched with those who have same lvl gear, so even people with bad gear can be on top, it’s matter of grinding hard)

I’m really getting tired of people comparing Diablo 3 to Diablo 2 and telling us that Diablo 3 does what Diablo 2 does with prettier graphics and we shouldn’t complain.

The problem is that Diablo 3 doesn’t do anything else. Diablo 3 doesn’t set itself apart. In many cases, Diablo 3 is LESS than Diablo 2 or breaks thing that worked in Diablo 2.

Diablo 3 needs to be a NEW game with NEW ideas. All it does is rehash the most basic ideas of Diablo 2 and waters many of them down.

This is NOT what many of us wanted. Diablo 3 is supposed to make us FORGET about Diablo 2. It doesn’t. In fact, as this article and most articles around the web I’ve read recently show, Diablo 3 is STUCK in Diablo 2’s shadow because it doesn’t do anything remarkable or better.

but the epics diablo 3 is not maeked for diablo vets but for the wow generation that never got into diablo 1/2…

the reason i loved blizzard way back then was – they made games that didnt appeal to everybody. they had their warcraft and starcraft – which were just not my cup of tea. but they also – under blizzard north – had diablo 1/2.

looking at blizzard nowadays… i did play SC2 and i even kinda liked the campaign mode… which was more than unexpected. and not what i hoped for, tbh. since i was hoping that they could still be making games that pleased only fans of that certain genre. and not even all of those. but, as far as i can judge – they went all out to please everyone.

which just makes for a bland product for their fans – for casuals its great, sure, but its a very poor long term customer binding decision.

Errr… Sorry, but Im a casual player and D3 isnt fun. A can’t farm forever to get a lot of gold to buy gear to finish the game. In D2, I know doing MF runs in some time I can get something to use/trade. In D3 you play for days and dont get any rewards at all. Gold farm got nerfed to the ground, so…

well, tbh, i stopped playing D3 shortly after the last patch. there is just nothing that gives me any reason to keep playing.

gear? no, maybe when/if they implement good legendarys. grinding? no, without working towards a lvl up or at least items its pointless addiction? no, i guess i am out of that age already. or its D3, who knows.

So to sum it up, the biggest difference between d2 and d3 is that the developers who made d3 seemed to ride the short bus to work; they have utterly screwed the dog the past x number of years to release this product that doesnt even seem 70% done… its a joke! and there is no where to point your finger except at the developers. They are the ones who made all of the big decisions for the game; decisions they did not seem to give ANY thought to at all or to look at the prior trends as to what people want in this type of game, ironic considering this is Blizzard, the company who had made the most replayable games in the world up to this point.

Some say the developers dropped the ball, I say they crapped the bed. I hope many heads have rolled for this, it also makes me wonder just how small their development team is at the rate that patches/ fixes are coming out, and whats with them blowing the total non issue of mf gear swapping into such a huge thing? seems like the developers are the only ones who know of anyone bothered by mf gear swapping so they ignore all the other current HUGE problems with the game so they can SCREW THE POOCH SOME MORE. how they collect paycheques with their productivity level is beyond me.

The item-hunt is fine, IMO. It does need better items and a slightly improved drop rate on some types, but aside from that I’m happy with it. However, I do think there needs to be some kind of aim for it. Sure, there’s finishing Inferno (which was supposed to keep us occupied for months – mission: successful for many of us) but it would be great if there was also something /different/ to accomplish.

Your article and moreover the poll is missing some major points: level cap, ladder resets and skill diversity. The item hunt was only one part of the D2 endgame. If D3 had a better and more complex item system, level 99 cap, ladder resets and greater skill diversity, it could have been the game I have been waiting for years…

this the thing i miss most is the community aspect, it bugged me in sc2 and it’s worse in d3. battlenet 2.0 way of hiding us from each other hurts diablo a lot. like some post mentioned earlier regarding hardcore, we can’t just make a game asking for items or a waypoint or a rush, we can’t trade in the real sense where you bargained with both items and runes/gems (gold in d3) to force us to use the AH they prevent us from interacting with eachother and that makes the lack of endgame a lot worse,, what’s the point of grind to get decent gear if you can’t show off? why do i have to scrap decent lowlevel weapons when i could just join a low level game and give them?

what we need is an aH system but for creating and finding games, sort by playtime lvl dps range etc and search by name of the game..

if not d3 will slowly become a singleplayer game you can’t play offline..

I bought D3 about a month ago, currently nearing the end of Nightmare, still enjoying it, still think in many ways its a vast improvement over D2, but hell its not as ‘addictive’.

– The lack of lower level set/legendaries needs to be sorted out – A ladder would be a great implementations – PVP will improve the game – I would like for us to allocate skill points, since the fact that you ‘could’ ruin your character actually makes you want to create another

I do feel though a lot of people are forgetting D2 when released wasn’t very good, and 1-2years of updates and the release of LOD improved the game x10, which made it so great.

I do feel an expansion will basically do the same for D3 (new characters, fixes, charms etc etc…) as well as Blizzard’s healthy appetite for updates…

Seems like everyone is focused on the endgame, I’ve completed normal with two characters and got ZERO legendaries or set items, and from what I hear I shouldn’t expect to see either for another 100-200 more hours of play time. THIS kills it for me. I could gamble for a legendary helm in act one in D2, and you would always find one or two set pieces per act, driving you on to complete the set. I haven’t played in a week, and yes, reading about it is far more interesting than playing it. Sad.=(

I have two characters in Hell and am not expecting to have to worry about the endgame for a while. I’m enjoying D3 quite a lot but I definitely miss the interesting uniques/sets you could find at lower levels in D2.

1) No quest rewards 2) Crappy storyline (In particular a1 a2 and a3 oh wait the whole game) 3) No drops from bosses AT ALL until level 60. 4) A full extra difficulty to grind thru 5) The knowledge that you will not find a single good item pre-60 6) The knowledge that you will not likely find a single good item post-60 7) The lame skills, skill UI and total lack of any sort of fun in building your character.

I could go on man, they have no beginning or mid game as it stands at the moment. None at all.

1) You mean aside from the XP and gold? 2) Storyline’s alright. It’s not going to win any awards but it has enough presence to keep things interesting. Not that it’ll do so much after the first playthrough, but that’s not why we play this kind of game. 3) Except for the huge bunch of items they drop, of course. 4) Not really a problem if you enjoy playing the game. 5) I’ve found plenty of good items. Items that have got me really excited. Some of these have been *gasp* legendaries. They won’t keep me going at end game, but they’re not supposed to. 6) I’ve found some. And Blizzard are adjusting the game to make this more likely. 7) The skills are awesome and remind me how trite D2 really was. I’ll agree that the UI isn’t brilliant, but it does the job it needs to. I’ve made several characters, 3 up to 60 and my 3rd HC char that’s now 40-something. Getting the char up to 60, making use of the available skills, is great fun.

Some of your points are down to opinion, which is fine. Most of them are just plain nonsense.

Item fixes are a must. After that, and sometime after whatever primary expansions are planned, I’d like to see an endless dungeon mode. Infinite floors of increasing difficulty (and quality drops…) with a level cap of at least 100. Instead of ladder, people could compete to see who could make it to the lowest floor.

My gripe isn’t really with the end game, it’s that there are many features reserved for the end (of the) game which I think would work better spread out through all the difficulty levels. I don’t really need an end game, I just want a better overall experience. 🙂 For starters, I’d like to see gear sets and Nephalem Valor (or some form of it)available in lower difficulties. I would also like to see better incentive to play through the different random events post level 60. Grinding only Rare and Champion packs gets old fast. Blizzard did a great job with all the random events and it would be nice to incorporate benefits to also playing through them after my character has reached level 60.

—The same company made both games. You mean to tell me they couldn’t borrow a COUPLE of WoW End-Game ideas and put them into Diablo 3 after 8 years of Development? And maybe alter them a bit to make them more ARPG friendly?

Bottom Line – Whatever worked in Diablo 2 is NOT GOOD ENOUGH in Diablo 3. And with no modding or offline modes, the community can’t even create it’s OWN content to keep the game fresh or interesting. (Another reason Torchlight 2 will have an edge on Diablo 3)

This guy gets it. I think this is exactly what D3 needs in terms of PvM end game. Some type of random tileset, daily dungeon populated with random monsters and bosses. Chests every few floors (that actually take your MF into account) would spice up the monotony of the item hunt. It would give incentive to log in and provide more interesting/exciting runs than just Act 1 Inferno over and over again.

If you think about it, D3 end game as it stands right now is actually quite similar to that of D2 – Warden+Butcher/Siegebreaker boss runs again and again, replacing endless Baal runs. Gaming has come a long way in the past ten years, and people expect regular content updates and different things to do.

i cant even bring myself to make an A2 run (Kulle / Belial +10-30 champs) because its not satisfying. Items are just effing boring. even if i find good items they’ll wont be interesting.

It’s like flux & co said in the last podcast. you could find that eg. a titans in a fresh ladder and you’d be like ” holy shit now i have to make a javelin ! thats gonna be awesome!”

the equivalent to that in d3 is ; oh i found a ~800 dps weapon with ~50% critdmg and not so terrible stats ; i guess i gonna sell it for 500k gold …

because every class works the same there is no incentive to farm because the items are just shitty. In d2 you could find and runeword’ weapons that made entire builds possible or in fact created builds where none ever existed in the first place … but in d3 you are just piling on the same shitty stats / attributes ; the more the better ; and thats supposed to be fun or motivating ?

i also think that legs / sets are simply to rar … in d2 i found uniqes / sets of decent quality all the time. in d3 i even have hard time finding shitty ones (and lets be honest 95% of them are outright shitty)

D3 essentially has WoW’s end game in terms of character development, where you get to max level and then it’s just item hunting forever. Which is unfortunate, since it puts more pressure on the item hunting aspect, since that’s all you can do at high levels. In D2 you hunted items, but even though you seldom found upgrades you felt that at least you’d made character progress via gaining exp and levels.

Ya know…never thought I’d say this but maybe there still needs to be a Ladder. Similar to hardcore you wouldn’t be able to use the RMAH because your chars would be either deleted or moved to Non-Ladder (which could then use RMAH), actually in that mindset maybe they could still use the RMAH but it would have to be a seperate one from the Non-Ladder one. Don’t give ladder any additional content the way you did in D2, however add more lvls with super tediousness to it i guess…idk just an idea that hopefully someone else will see and it will set off a better idea to blossom from this one.

D3 doesn’t need a new “endgame” It needs gameplay that will make people want to keep playing longer. Diablo 2 didn’t have an endgame. We simply enjoyed the game enough to keep playing and make up our own endgame from it. Diablo 3 doesn’t have that enjoyment to the core game behind it.

The problem isnt that D3 has no endgame, the problem is that its endgame sucks balls or is even SMALLER than D2 LoD. D2 LoD had good end game and good replayability mechanics, D3 has none.

So no sorry, if D2 LoD was released with D3 graphics, some fixes to broken mechanics and a 6button gameplay like D3, it would bury the current D3.

And I’m sorry but it is fair to compare LoD to D3 (rather than D2 vanilla). Blizzard should improve, not regress. Also they had 11 years since LoD. I’m sorry but D3 doesn’t justify its production time.

And its not even finished, it looks more like an untested beta than anything.

The game is overall very good, but it could use tweaks: – item patch for legendaries – skill balance patch – pvp patch All these have been promised. Additionally, I’d like to see the following: – improved quest rewards to motivate alt play – more craft recipes like runewords that give some fixed stats (at all levels) – improvement to public games (nerf hp on monsters maybe or improve drops)

Fixing items would go a long way to alleviate this problem for many, though I’m still having fun just trying to find rares and get enough gold to not go broke, but anyway, people like those Holy Grail Carrots to chase after and I don’t blame them, because that’s fun.

I recall during development a lot was made of the modular sections of maps where random events would spawn, and indeed those are awesome. While leveling. As soon as you don’t need exp anymore, events become worthless, and in fact are just time spent not stacking valor. Finding a way to make increasingly challenging events with attractive award for max level players (big stores of crafting materials/plans, for instance) would go a long way to providing variety.

The problem is character development. We need level 99. Diablo II past 85 you got even more powerful. By the time you were mid 90’s your strength with being above the creatures levels made things much easier, and should. D3 doesn’t have this option.

There are not permanent character choices, and I’m appaulled that there isn’t even a feat tree since skills are on the fly. That would of made the game better, and would allievate the fact that stats are pre-appointed.

Thirdly, this is nothing but a DPS game. Why? D2 and D1 were less about total DPS(Less by saying you could get by with little, but still needed some. There is no alternative to being able to build a tank type character. Part of this is do to the increased pace of the game. D1 is slower than D2 and D2 is slower than D3.

Lastly, the boss/champion mods are just annoying. I’ve never played in a game to where the mods are just so utterly annoying in my life that I don’t even enjoy them.

Items, items, and more items. I play RPGs to find loot and not buy loot so that has to be my biggest complaint. I love playing the game and I am having a blast but I just wish the AH was there to supplement my loot not provide it a 100%

I think what amazes me is that D2 lasted so many years with just the item hunt and no auction house. Now that that we have auction houses the item hunt isn’t good enough anymore. Remove the auction houses, improve the items and magic find.

3) Lack of character customization —> lack of player “bond” with character

4) Player is forced into one method of play. Farm 5 stacks of valor an a boss. Gone is the freedom to farm what you want that exists in D2. In D3 you can farm chests, areas, bosses, and minibosses to your heart’s content.

5)RMAH is bad, bad, oh yes, ever so very, very bad for the game.

6) With no actual “permanent” builds (only skills of the moment) there is no reason to play another character of the same class that you have played before. You experienced everything the class has to offer on that one character. Every wizard is every wizard. Bleh.

Oh, lest I forget… 7) Slow paced, tedious gameplay due to insane monster prefixes, constant vortexing, teleporting on top of, jailing, and walling of the player = BLEH.

This is pretty spot on. Only one I can come close to disagreeing with is 4) because doing full clears is more enjoyable than killing Hell Meph fifteen hundred times, for me at least. That said with the way it’s set-up, it’s extremely time consuming and thus must sink in a lot of time which is pretty off-putting if you only have like 30 minutes to play

It’s not the lack of endgame that strangles longterm replayability. It’s the lack of meaningful decisions married with a lack of possibilitys for an invividual flavour.

Hard to break down the latter… In case of items, an additional stat like “faster spell speed” might help, which, well, speeds up the animation of spells. (Just the speed, not the time the animation runs. Thus some spells may go beyound their momentarily reach and the time between ticks of DoTs may be shortened. Should imho not been put together with faster attack speed, with the exception of hte one or other legendary/setbonus)

I think that one big problem Diablo III had to deal with were simply the expectations. There was never much doubt about D3 becoming a huge commercial success (all long-term Diablo fans are constantly reminded of the efforts made in order to appeal to the casual gaming audience).

But given the fact that Blizzard as an industry-leading company invested a decade of developement time, a scrapped version that didn’t meet their standards and an undoubtly considerable budget into the developement of a sequel to an existing IP, ultimatly left people quite underwhelmed with the result. D3 is a solid gaming experience that does a lot of things right and some things even much better than its predecessors. It is, however, not another stellar, genre re-defining and groundbreaking entry into video game history in any way – but that exactly was the level of expectation for it, given above stated circumstances.

Who’s to blame for that? The fans, of course, who set these high expectations. But so is Blizzard for hyping the game like hell (announcing the game to the public as early as they had like two tilesets and a couple of cinemetic rendering-concepts to show) and consequently discarding one new concept after another during the course of developement in return. In the end, a Diablo 2 clone with ‘mixed reception” 3D-graphics and a few enhanced game mechanics was all that was left of their high ambitions.

Not fully living up to the expectations is one thing, but then boldly adding evils like DRM, copious real money transactions, character developement parenting and apparently cutting down on actual pre-release gameplay testing, was probably too much.

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On the matter of confusion about missing MMO-style end-game content: They made it pretty clear that Diablo 3 was planned to be a finished boxed product, plus maybe a few post-release patches for the number crunching. Though on their forums, which may not have been the right scope for this kind of announcement, despite this info not exactly being advertisement for the game.

What’s funny though is that they had and still have to make system additions, system overhauls and re-iterations post-release – which might explain where those MMO-style endgame expectations are coming from. Also, when Inferno difficulty was announced, it was pretty clearly stated that it was meant to be a first step towards an end-game solution which they did not have fully fleshed out at that time and might have to implement via post-release patches …

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Items as an end-game solution: I really would to love rely on Blizzard’s reputation of getting things right in the long run. But considering how they were probably already nervous to pull their capacities from the finishing stages of D3 to get them working on MoP finishing, HotS finishing and their newly developed IP, I don’t see those legendaries and set items return with any fun affixes that set them apart from common magic items on the one hand but on the other hand involve a lot of design/programming/testing work. I fully expect those ‘end-game items’ to return with nothing more than higher stat numbers at this point.

They will definitely hand in PVP later, it’s too late to change their minds on that one, as the boxed product shipped with that promise. Further/better end-game solutions that were announced as a possibility, however, will take the same path as D2 guild halls though.

* Remove the level cap or raise it much higher. I really hate it. No level ups removes a fun part of the end game. Even if it is just stat increases with no new skills. We want to get continually more powerful so that situations that used to kick our butt are now easier. If the concern is PvP, ignore skill levels above 60 for PvP.

* At level 61, provide the option to ‘master’ a skill. Mastering it means it is permanently in your group of 6 and it gets a boost in power. By level 61 you’ve had a chance to try all the skills and know what you like. Some players might master all six for maximum power. Some might just master one or two so they have flexibility with the rest of their slots. Would help with character customization/personalization and would provide a reason to eventually create another char of the same profession.

* Provide a way to craft great items using rare ingredients from high level boss kills. That is the way Monster Hunter does it, and it is extremely fun and addictive. There is a long list of awesome gear (like uniques in D2). Everything is crafted, and you only get good crafting ingredients from defeating high level bosses. The drops you get from high level bosses are random, with the rarest ingredients having 2-5% chance to drop. This has a lot of benefits. You can see great gear that you want to work towards. You can’t get it cheaply (no trading in MH) – you have to be good enough to defeat high level bosses. Stuff is rare, so when you get one it is exciting. And you know eventually you’ll likely be able to get what you need. Not like the Zod rune in D2 where you could play 50 years and never get one (without cheating/dupes).

* Move away from random affixes (or remove the worst ones) and work towards learning monster behavior. It is fun if a monster is super hard when you first encounter them, but then if you learn their patterns/tells/behavior you can avoid getting hit and defeat them. Gaining power through knowledge not just gear. D3 doesn’t have much of that. It is just “Boy, I hope this boss’s random affix set is not too impossible.” That is not very fun.

* Not end game – but I agree with others that NV should be available the entire game. I found almost zero usable items from NM Act I to Hell Act I.

your skill mastery idea is pretty solid. Would leave the skills much as is for the casuals while allowing for an advanced mode where players lock in builds and do the whole theory crafting they love so much.

I personally love the random affixes. It’s only on certain overpowered mobs I’ve had difficulty with them. Ran into a horde, molten, (and whatever else) subjugator rare today and it took quite a while to beat. But that is because subjugator’s hit like trucks to begin with.

I’m fine with lvl cap. I never once got to lvl 99 in D2. There reached a point in the mid 80’s where gaining a level just didn’t make a difference. The game was already farmable by that point. Besides that, you reach new level cap of 99 and then what? You are left with the exact same issue. D2 had ladders but I never found that interesting. Most people can’t possibly compete with people who play all day every day. So what is the real point of that? To say I reached level 99? Well, I reached level 60 and that is essentially the same thing. As in, I reached max level.

NEW ideas need to be thought up to really create a valid end game. But no matter what, I think many players will still reach an “end”. The item hunt is still the primary goal and for some people, it just gets boring. Even I get bored with it after a while. I played D2 in the style of play a bunch, burn out, wait a few months, repeat.

The poll have so terrible options I’m not voting. It reminds me how my country produce corrupt statistics.

Of course items need to be fixed. There is no need to question that.

What game really need is depth. Like HC death replay, class balance, multiplayer which is not penalizing, a functioning AH, acceptable crafting and repair costs. And much more the community addresses every day.

Extremely amateurish poll. Not the first hint I get what’s leading this site. I’m gone. HF!

I have played everyday since launch, and will continue to play. I really hope they will fix the Legendaries and Sets, that was one thing I liked trying to collect, and getting a Shako or Reaper’s Toll never got old to me. The thing that is missing to me is “stuff” to find. In D2, there were charms(who didnt love finding a skiller or 7%MF small charm) and runes were a game within the game. How long did you look for a ethereal Thresher to use the socket recipe on and not get the sockets you wanted? How long did it take to get the runes to make Grief and a 5 socket Phase Blade? Even something as simple as the Horadric Cube added depth to the game.

I have a hard time comprehending how they could have shipped with the Legendaries being as bland as they are. With all the monster affixes in Inferno, they could have made some really cool items to help your character defend against some of them. I think they were on the right track with making rare items more viable than they were in D2, but they should not have thought that trying to get a few more Int or Vitality on an item would keep people busy for months or years. Also, why cant they add new material every so often? They have the money, and 2-3 years for an expansion is too long.

The small rewards grind that was 80-99 as that one guy who got uprated so much is simply getting better gear in this game and because there is nothing incredibly outstanding about that gear people don’t like that grind. I would also prefer a way to set your character apart.

Lulz @ everyone who didn’t vote 5! Are you seriously complaining about endgame for a game that ISN’T an MMO? Diablo was NEVER a MMO nor will it be! GTF back to your WoW or Hello Kitty Online & QQ on their forums you [email protected]!

The one thing that is a major let down for me on diablo 3 is the inability for some classes to use certain weapons. IMO strength should add melee damage to every class, as dex should give ranged damage and inteligence should give “magical” damage. I always loved making random builds, specially based on unique items that granted unique abilities (not just skills, some abilities like piercing, freezing and such). I miss that the most. 😥

Since this game is based on randomness, why do they just create an occasional “random event quest” like something to hunt for or collect, then trade it to the “Event NPC” for certain items. And those items can be either a “temporary buff” for a certain duration that is also account-bound. Eventho Diablo is not “supposedly” to be an MMO, but since they are always online… then perhaps they have no choice but to adapt to it.

Nope, the game does not need an end-game of any kind. It only needs to be fun, which is not.

In response to the following argument “Diablo 3 is good enough for a 60€ game”, I’ll answer this : – if you take in account the time you can play the game and the “technical” quality of the game, yes, D3 is a very good game ; – but, if you were waiting for a sequel to D2 (as a core Diablo fan), then you can consider it’s a total failure, and so far, even another end-game won’t solve this.

In fact this game should have been called WOW3, and everybody would have been happy with that.

TBH it need the items and the drop system to have a complete overhaul, 1) 80%+ of items are junk 2) The drop rate for the better items is to low. I mean just look at what drops when playing the game normally with out using AH your lucky if you get an item that for clvl 18 dropping in normal. 2) Legendaries are far to rare, expressly given how poor they are, in fact IMO the drop rate need to be boosted even after they been improved in power (unless they end up being stupidly powerful).